This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
In Britain there is a love for a classicist (here, this relates primarily to ancient Greece, but also to Roman antiquity). And very much in particular, there is a love for someone with classicist knowledge who uses it to tell magical tales. This goes back to Shakespeare, who helped in a territorial-oneiric struggle with the Rome of catholicism, by going further back in time and further east, to the sunlit, arcadian expanses of the ancient Greece of Sophocles. This love for classical antiquity expresses itself in relation to many forms of writing, from stories about teachers of classics (as with The Browning Version) to the poems of Keats, and from The Wind in the Willows (the chapter “the piper at the gates of dawn” is about a meeting with the god Pan) to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. Again, it goes from the works of Lewis Carroll (who, along with classical references within the Alice books, wrote a seminal paper within philosophical logic that takes the form of a dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise) to C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books, and from T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland, to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The underlying issue here is modernism (Shakespeare was a
proto-modernist who in fact went back to ancient Greece to get help in the struggle
against religion). This gives additional depth to the fact that the British
feel far more instinctive warmth for a classicist than they do for a priest. Which does not mean that the British are not embroiled in religion (the most successful of
the works just listed – The Lord of the Rings – is to a great extent a religious
paratext); it just means that with their empiricist tradition they have a
heightened preference for dreamings, as opposed to any form of abstraction that
could be construed as dogma.
But in this
context, the question of modernism immediately leads to the question of
directions on the planet – and to the question, initially, of east and west. The
British have a deep tendency to dream the east, starting with the ancient
Greece of Shakespeare, but going on through warm countries to the mountainous
grasslands where Orlando is transformed into a woman, and to the India that
draws the Beatles out of Europe into another zone of dreaming (and the Greek
pantheon connects up in the oneirosphere to the Hindu pantheon, a connection
made by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). However, it is another direction – the west –
that has been taken up and re-enforced by the local zone of the interiority
(and it is to be remembered that the interiority is as much
military-territorial as it is religio-oneiric). Before Shakespeare the west had
been the important direction within
new state-adopted dreamings in Britain, in the form of the tales of the
Arthurian mythos. And after tudor times the fact that this mythos will not go away
(for instance Tennyson brings it back in the 19th century, and
T.H.White in the 20th) will be compounded – and fundamentally
eclipsed - by the rise to prominence of the USA. The earlier dreamings about
the west (which in fact go all the way back to the ancient Greek story of
Atlantis) may well all along have been boosted by tales of the actual west, from the Viking explorers for instance, but speculation about these connections
is irrelevant in comparison with the issue of the emergence of a new zone of protestant
fixation to the west.
The fixation is revealed
by pointing out that over the last five hundred years there have been two
processes of expansion into immense continental hinterlands - one of which
directly involved the terrain of Europe – that were in the contiguous domains
of the planet in relation to Britain, but only one of them has been a focus of
attention, and this was the one in fact which did not involve Europe’s terrain.
Because the Russian expansion was Russian orthodox, and not protestant, and
because, with people caught up in religious and pseudo-rational blocked-metaphysics, there
is a lack of a Spinozistic love for the planet (one which sees its worlds – and
overall world - as fundamentally on the same level as ours, and as including
ours) the sublimely beautiful expanses of this other hinterland have been
implacably suppressed – edited out - within western European and U.S. awareness, and within 'anglophone' awareness in particular.
To point out
that a lot of this suppression has been
due to political factors is merely to point out that the interiority is
fundamentally about the control of territories (the primary source of religions is the
determination to control terrain, along with the determination to control
women). When I was five years old, and living in southwest Wales (I lived in
Haverford West for two years) I had a striking dream about the east: I think my
mother had been telling me about communist Russia, and I dreamed that I was
seeing a small area of a park in a Russian city, with nothing there but a park bench
and a few trees. The dream was in monochrome, indicating something
fundamentally denuded about what I was seeing, and the park bench gave me a
feeling of desolation – a feeling of loneliness and a misery with a bleak
thinness, as if there was not even enough energy for misery. My mother’s - presumably somewhat negative - portrayal of the eastern bloc would, I expect,
have been the trigger for this experience, but the dream gives a suggestion of
a kind of oneiric iron curtain sliding down, as if what was being put into
place – by a dream - was the view that there was nothing worth dreaming in that
direction. This dream leaves you wondering
about what forces are at work in our dreaming up the nature of the
world, within both the sleeping and waking dimensions of our normal existence –
it leaves you asking in relation to ordinary reality “whose dream is this, anyway?”
The Rocky
Mountains have been glowingly turned into a “sacred earth” terrain, unlike the
mountains of the hinterland into which Russia expanded. There are many factors
involved here (for instance, the eastern hinterland is along much colder
latitudes than the western one). But it can be felt that this spectacular
extension of Europe does not fit at all well with a certain triumphalist
territorial dreaming-system pertaining to the west of Europe. It belongs to a
country which is neither protestant nor catholic (the protestants are protesting
against catholicism to transform it into protestantism, and both sides see the
other as really, futurally, belonging to them). It opens up the horror of the
destruction and suppression of the indigenous societies (a lot of effort has
gone into fitting the American indigenous people into the USA's ‘sacred earth’ story, but
here instead of a romanticising there is a convenient silence, so that Europe simply does not acknowledge its own
brutality in this domain). But perhaps most fundamentally it opens up a
profound closeness to the outside – a spectacular contiguity and zone of indiscernibility
which is thousands of miles long. From the point of view of this zone of the
interiority the USA has the great advantage that in the sunnier terrains
over the southern border there is yet more of the west. Nothing could be
further from the truth in the hinterland immensity of eastern Russia. Here, in
the more sun-favoured areas to the south there is China, whose oneiric and
abstract tradition is implacably and imperturbably non-western, and whose
potential for modernist/ancientist lucidity cannot be quarantined within the
space of the dead-tradition magical tales of ancient Greece. In China there is an
unbroken line to that important text of metamorphics, Tao Te Ching,
with its philosophical ultra-feminism (for both men and women becoming-woman is
what is vital - "knowing the masculine, and nurturing the feminine." / "can you be female?"), and with its single proto-modernist story suggested within the space of the lucid abstraction, the story that reaches the Future through the past of that
time, 2500 years ago – "there were once ‘ancient masters of Way,’ but something
has gone wrong" (this preceding phrase is a "paraphrase" of the story, not a quotation) -
Ancient
masters of Way
All subtle
mystery and dark-enigma vision:
They were
deep beyond knowing,
So deep
beyond knowing
we can only
describe their appearance.
[...]
perfectly
simple, as if uncarved wood;
perfectly
empty, as if open valleys,
and
perfectly shadowy, as if murky water.
Who’s murky
enough to settle slowly into pure clarity,
And who
still enough to awaken slowly into life?
[...] (15)
With its
profoundly female exponents of Way (those individuals who are systematically
capable of letting go toward Love-and-Freedom, and of leaving the dogmas and
fixations of the interiority) Tao Te Ching was a main starting point for
the dreamings of Ursula Le Guin (who also made a translation) and is an outside
of the west, which, far from having been superseded, is simply waiting for it,
in the Future.
On one level
everything here concerns “centres,” or points of fixation, both in relation to
the oneirosphere (each religion creates the view that its story is the story) and in relation to terrains
and territories. The Celtic Arthurian tradition aimed to set up a new central
point in the west, displacing Rome (Arthur defeats Rome), and to an extent it
succeeded, with anglican London (the centre to which T.S.Eliot emigrates –
T.S.Eliot, with his Arthurianism in The Wasteland). Shakespeare “supported” the
creation of a new centre, but only in a way where he subverts the blocked
metaphysics involved: instead of going west, he goes southeast to ancient
Greece, putting in place a new zone for dreaming, as opposed to a fixation point,
and turning the abstract-oneiric field involved toward the Outside. A new
centre then emerges on the opposite side of the atlantic (Washington, with a primary sacred terrain in
the form of the Black Hills of Dakota and the Rockies). Tolkien subsequently is
the oneiric reaction on the part of the western wing of the trans-establishment
– a kind of white terror. Gondor in the Tolkien mythos is Rome (it is also
England, but primarily it is Rome, hundreds of miles away in a much warmer
climate to the southeast of the Shire, like Rome in relation to England). And
to the east of Rome, instead of ancient Greece, there is an evil empire
–instead of Arcadia, there is Mordor. Tolkien takes a little of the magic of
ancient Greece through the “ents,” and through the phrase “dishevelled dryad
loveliness” (used in relation to an area just to the east of Gondor) but he
makes sure there are no female ents around, because tree nymphs would give far
too much allure, and would return attention to ancient Greece. Tolkien
turns everything back to the west (instead of Avalon there is Valinor) but as a
catholic he keeps the chivalric-chauvinist “spiritual” conservatism of the
medieval Arthurian tales, while stripping away all of the elements of the older
mythos. Valinor is taken off the surface of the planet (though you sail
west to get there) and put into another dimension, so that there is no danger of
any confusion with the protestant project of the USA, and a revenge is taken
against Wales, for having won out in an oneiric and physical war against the
catholic plantagenets: Wales is simply removed from existence, to the west of
the Shire there are some low, uninhabited hills, and then the sea…
However, in the last analysis none of this concerns Britain, or east and west. It concerns Shakespeare, and more centrally it concerns what Shakespeare discovered, which was a vantage with a profound connection to the ancient Greece of Sophocles. But in indicating this vantage, Shakespeare is careful to open up a continuum that runs from England to India, and that in fact extends across the whole of the planet (Puck's terrain is the planet - "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes"). The place is not in any way the crucial aspect - what is crucial is the way of dreaming the world, and the aspects of the transcendental-empirical that are visible through the modality of dreaming, along with the way in which the unknown appears within it. And the key point is that ultimately where this leads is a way of seeing which has no specific connection to Ancient Greece - this is the ability to create dreamings which consist of outsights, and most of all it is a woken faculty of lucidity.
With the modality of dreaming which Shakespeare discovers it makes no sense to locate its worlds in Ancient Greece with any high degree of emphasis, because it concerns a way of oneirically looking toward the whole planet, in which the terrains around Athens are not in themselves special in some way in relation to the terrains of India or of northwest Europe; and it is also because there is a kind of deadly separation here: the Athens of Sophocles is also a point of emergence of a trapped form of reason (reason is a faculty which is required, but at the expense of lucidity it is disastrous - the sleep that is reason without lucidity breeds monsters).
Shakespeare moves over this point of emergence without comment, because it is a question of re-dreaming - of getting back to Sophocles in order to go further, and of seeing the whole world through a faculty of dreaming informed by lucidity. And in relation to east and west he simultaneously refuses to open up any connection to the religion and religionised nationalism of the west-focused mythos of Arthurianism.
It can be seen that the west here relates to a religious and nationalist anti-vantage, an anti-vantage which also consists of an insidious form of gender-role suppressionism - and the vital point at this stage of the explication is that the details of the oneiric and actual forms of 'the west' are ultimately indicative of the overall abstract modality - an abstract modality which is here being grasped in terms its reactionary oneiric aspect, but which also includes a functioning of an attenuated but simultaneously hypertrophied form of reason (reason cut off from lucidity).
In Shakespeare there is a joyful exteriority and there is tragedy as a dark, perturbing element of the human world. And a key aspect of his radicalism is that in A Midsummer Night's Dream he creates a view of an England presided over by Greek and Roman deities (Hecate, Cupid). But he does not re-dream along these lines in order to argue for the existence of these deities, any more than he is trying to convince the audience of the existence of Titania and Oberon. Instead it is a full - transcendental-empirical - openness toward the unknown that is in question, and to heighten this perspective he goes east to India, to a place where there was - and where there still is - an extant pantheonism. He goes further east in order to deepen the power of the form of dreaming which he has discovered.
And beyond this Sophoclean or Arkadian form of dreaming there is another, one which has been taken over a threshold because lucidity has been fully effectuated. The impression given by Shakespeare is that in crucial ways he has developed transcendental-empirical dreaming not just to a high degree, but to a point where it is hard to go further without the explicit functioning of the faculty of lucidity.
It is necessary to
take another point of reference, to go alongside Warwickshire. The place is not being chosen randomly, but this taking up of a new reference point is to
be done in the name of the Outside, and with the aim of leaving behind all
centres – all fixation points – in the direction of the planet, and in the
direction of the world of energy and intent that is the cosmos.
Stand on a hill a
few miles to the south of Abakan, in Kharkassia, and look south to the Sayan
Mountains. These mountains are exceptionally beautiful: they are covered in
forests, and their jagged 10,000 foot summits (craggy peaks towering up out of
tree-covered ridges) are spread across a gigantic area that spreads all
around Tuva, and extends into the north of Mongolia.
Behind you Abakan
is an entirely European city (as European as a city in Arizona or Utah is American, despite the presence of the
Navajo and Hopi cultures in the vicinity, in such cities in the USA). Its
elegant wrought-iron railings and tree-lined avenues are suggestive not of Asia
or of communism (although in one city-centre park there is a very fine soviet
era mural, showing human beings in their relationship with the natural world,
and with science) but of the Europe of Budapest and Prague, and of the Russian cultural/intellectual world that finds expression in the works of Tolstoy (the modernist liberalism of Tolstoy is kept quarantined by the
west, as a kind of costumed historical zone, rather than being seen as a major
element within modern-day Russia).
You are therefore
very much in Europe (in this cultural-descriptive context, to say that Abakan
is in Asia is as appropriate as to say that the USA is “really” a part of an indigenous-culture continuum of North America). Furthermore, the latitude has nothing bleak or extreme about it. The
Sayan Mountains are on the same latitude as England – they are far to the south
in Siberia (Ulan Bator in Mongolia is a long way to the south of London).
They are
also around the same size as England.They are two areas or ranges of high
mountains which are interlocked with each other – the Eastern Sayan and the
Western Sayan – and that are covered in plateau-forests which are
very rarely visited by humans.These are immense arcadias of pine-trees,
meadows covered in gentians, sculptural craggy outcrops, blueberries, bears,
deer, three foot tall violet-coloured lilies growing by tiny streams, eagles in
daylight skies, and owls in the twilight.
.
But these
mountains are around – and form the majority of - Tuva to the east, west and
north (and also to the south), and go into Mongolia, where there are some of
the highest peaks. So what you are seeing, on the hill to the south of Abakan,
is the beginnings of a terrain which is not part of Europe at all, and for two
different reasons. Firstly because Mongolia is not in any sense part of Europe,
and secondly because ethnic Tuvans – who form the vast majority of the
population of Tuva – evidently do not regard themselves as European (on the
contrary, their account of Tuva is that it is the centre of Asia, and there is a
monument celebrating this designation in the capital, Kyzyl).
In a technical sense relating to human description systems these mountains have a mysterious aspect, in that maps are not easily available for them. It seems the Russian state has blocked their production (I was told in Stanford's map shop in Covent Garden that Siberia is the only area on the planet where there are whole ranges of mountains for which there are no published, generally available maps). All that was available was an "air chart" - a sketch without contour lines, taken from satellite information and used by planes - for only one part of one of the two main areas of the Sayan mountains. And it is perhaps also interesting that I had no dreams about this area until 2007, and that when I did have a dream - where I was in an abandoned military base deep within a vast area of mountainous forest - it was one of the most extraordinary and enigmatic dreams I have ever experienced (I described this dream in section 12 of Hidden Valleys).
But leave behind the world of arcadian daylight for a moment, with its tendency to be visual, and its tendency to leave us detached, appreciating the beauty of nature from an unnoticed stance of superiority and envisaged separation.
Imagine it is night, and you are in a forest in the Sayan mountains. Imagine you are grasping that the planet around us consists of the same substance as you, and is an immense, mysterious Space that is suffused with inorganic (virtual-real) forces and worlds. Listen into the place where you are; see into the darkness of the forest around you by seeing and listening with your whole body. See what happens.
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